In his debut feature Listen to the Voices [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Maxime Jean-Baptiste
ficha de la película], in the Cineasti del Presente competition at the Locarno Film Festival, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, young filmmaker from French Guiana currently living between Brussels and Paris, tells of the pain of those who stayed after the absurd death of his cousin Yannick.

Cineuropa: How was the idea for the film born and how did you work with your characters, who are Lucas’s real family members?
Maxime Jean-Baptiste: Yes, the characters are the real protagonists of the story, those who lived through the tragedy: Nicole, Melrick and Yannick. But, in the film, there is also some fiction in the sense that we tried to find a way to interpret their own story. This fictional side helped us all a lot. In fact, Nicole is my aunt, Melrick my young cousin and Yannick has become a close friend, so there’s a lot of closeness between us. Fiction allowed us to distance ourselves from the tragedy, so that reality didn’t overwhelm us. It was a very long working process. I started thinking about the film five, six years ago, and in that time, it took different shapes. The process has been long, but it was necessary for the three characters to live their pain. I talked with them a lot and, progressively, in the writing stage, with my sister Audrey (Jean-Baptiste), who co-wrote the film, the idea of making it a fiction narrative emerged. It’s actually a personal story that can nevertheless speak to other people who have lost loved ones in tragic circumstances.

Is it for those reasons that you decided to favour the fictional form rather than make a documentary?
The question of distance is undoubtedly central, but we also realised that, in terms of results, the more classical documentary aspect, the idea of staying totally in the real, wasn’t sufficient. The characters sometimes needed to get out of the story strictly speaking, to talk about something else. So the fiction gave us, as much for the characters as for myself, more freedom of interpretation. Sometimes, the classic documentary isn’t suitable for certain characters. Nicole, for instance, wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sitting down and talking directly to me as the director. She was more confident with the much more framed, more directed register of fiction.

On this point, in the film we notice that music and art more generally (especially street art) represent a real escape for the characters. Do you believe in the therapeutic power of art, of which cinema is part?
I suppose that there is, for me, a desire to heal all while knowing that the film is only a phase for them. I don’t have the pretension of doing therapeutic work, I don’t have the tools for that. At a critical moment in their lives, some cinematic tools helped them, especially Yannick, who is the most traumatised character. But work on the long term, some talk therapy, would also surely be required. He is truly locked in his traumas. In truth, the film allowed the protagonists to reopen their wounds, but there’s ulterior work to do, that of truly healing them.

Violence is palpable in the film but never shown. Why make this choice?
It is a thoughtful choice that took some time. With Audrey, but also with Olivier Marboeuf, the French producer, and the Belgian producers Rosa Spaliviero and Ellen Meiresonne, we went through different script writing phases. We wondered a lot about how to represent such a violent event, but what seemed most important to us was to really leave a place for the life of the characters, to understand how they’ve been living after the tragedy. That said, we inevitably needed to return to what had happened, to evoke it. It’s a systemic violence that affects French Guiana and its teenagers who often don’t have a lot of perspectives and self-destruct, killing each other for a matter of honour. We could have reconstructed the event through “clinical” details, but it wouldn’t have been the right approach, especially regarding the film’s protagonists who really experienced the tragedy. We therefore wanted to represent this violence in the most subtle way possible, yet without avoiding it. We wanted to keep more subtlety and think about how one lives with such trauma, which in itself is also a form of violence.